


The Spy and the Librarian

by Mz_Mallow



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Mating Cycles/In Heat, May/December Relationship, Other, Soul Sex, Weird Biology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 04:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8432626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mz_Mallow/pseuds/Mz_Mallow
Summary: A romance between two ghosts in Asgore’s service, just before the tragic War with humans.Companion and prequel to “The Problem of Bodies”; the origin of the Blook family as depicted in that fic (so, Napstablook and Mettaton’s grandparents); follows the “weird biology” described at the end of Chapter 2 (first chapter after prequel) of that fic.





	

**Author's Note:**

> "The Problem of Bodies" teased at "ghost sex" and then offered a dry academic paragraph about reproductive biology. Well... here's the ghost sex. It goes into vivid detail, but I think the fact that there's no genitals or bodily fluids involved means it can squeak by under a "mature" rating. If you think it belongs under an "explicit" rating, please don't hesitate to tell me so.

In the kindling weeks before the War — months into the rising tide of suspicion and innuendo and hostility, days before the first monster casualties fell to human aggression and ill will — every ghost employed in King Asgore’s Spectral Spy Contingent became a sexual being within the space of a few days.

In times of peace and plenty a ghost’s soul may swell with hope and their ectoplasmic form bud new individuals — asexual offspring, children to share the promise and bounty of the future. In times of prolonged anxiety a ghost may gain the ability to mate their soul to another ghost’s, each of the pair then bearing a child who combines traits of each parent in new ways, new founts of creativity to weather present difficulties and potential disasters to come.

The Spectral Spies had taken on varying assignments and levels of risk, carefully weighing their individual abilities and skills. But living in close quarters, when communication was the foremost purpose of every day and worst-case-scenario speculation was a career, stress and anxiety spread from soul to soul like a humans’ virus. And soon after the ability to create new souls through sex came the urge to do so. 

And so the de facto leader of the Spectral Spies, The Valorous Ghost, found the latest debriefing meeting attended by only three other ghosts, two of whom were cuddling and murmuring to each other and clearly treating the meeting as a short break between amorous sessions. Valorous sighed and tried to avoid watching the two; seeing the way the skirts of their ectoplasmic bodies clung to one another was making Val feel novel, preoccupying, inconvenient pangs.

“Have you seen the others? Are they coming?” Valorous asked impatiently.

The couple shook with a cascade of giggles and peeled themselves apart partially to face them.

“Perceptive and Rhetoric-loving,” supplied one of the pair, known as the Veracious Ghost, “… they’re filking.”

“They’re doing it doggerel-style,” added the other, the Lexical Ghost. The two leaned against each other, shaking with amusement.

“Right,” answered Valorous flatly. That left one ghost unaccounted for: the Deliberate Ghost. They were probably avoiding all of this chaos so they wouldn’t be pulled in. That was just like them – smart thinking. Val wished they’d had the foresight.

Valorous addressed the fourth ghost present. “Brash, thank you for being here and taking this seriously. I hope it isn’t rude of me to say, but I’m really glad to see we’ve got at least one person on the team who’s the type of ghost that doesn’t make the switch. I guess you and me are going to have to pick up the slack and find new recruits.”

The Brash Ghost snorted and their form rippled in a shrug, a play at casualness. “Uh, yeah. About that. I’m actually the type of ghost that switches over right away, and acts on it, and doesn’t tell the boss until later. By the way, can I get granted medical leave, a family release? In a couple weeks? And Del requests the same. They’d be here to ask you themself, but they’re kind of tired.” Brash blushed melon-colored.

Exasperated, Val reflexively responded to one part of the statement, with a phrase they’d had to repeat over and over. “I’m not anybody’s boss. I just happened to be the first ghost who had the idea.” A blue flush of irritation spread over their form. “And apparently the only one who still cares about what we’re doing for the kingdom,” they spat.

“Whoa, whoa,” chided Brash. “We’ve done plenty. The corporeal folk didn’t expect us ghosts to get involved at all, did they? And after that last report we turned in, there’s probably not much more we’ll have to do anyway. Asgore and his diplomats will do the legwork, but they never would have gotten that intelligence without us, right? So the Spectral Spies saved the kingdom. Isn’t that enough? Can’t we go back to living our lives now?”

Valorous hovered, the edge of their ectoplasm flicking with irritation. They couldn’t help rolling the words over in their mind. Normal ghost life. It sounded good.

Brash took Val’s silence as an invitation to keep talking, drifting forward and dropping their voice to a private volume. “If you’re worried you’re suddenly going to turn useless with a bud, don’t be. I’ve had buds before, hope buds, and yeah it’s true: with those you feel all happy and drowsy, and just kind of want to sit around and smile a lot, until they get close to abscission and the broody feelings get so bad you want to smother everyone in sight.” They chuckled. “This is different. I feel so sharp, like I want to take on all the world’s problems and fix everything in the next month. I’m telling you, for four weeks you’ll do better work for the king and queen than you’ve ever done. And after that, forget them. What’s happening here is new lineages, new souls, the future of ghosts. We’ve already done so much to solve the corporeal folks’ problems. And… I’m going to be frank here, so you’ll have to excuse my rudeness, but… you know, you’re not fooling anyone, acting all cold, like you're not affected by what’s going on. You look like you’re about to fall down.”

Val kept their face stoic, but couldn’t put together the words to deny it. An image rose in their mind of Brash and Del with ectoplasm enmeshed, and they shivered. 

Val made one last protest, voice muted. “Everyone is paired up already. I’d have to go through the whole process, go out into the city and sing and make a spectacle of myself, just on the off chance that there’s someone outside of us who’s switched, which there probably isn’t.”

“Or you could go mash it up with Pensive, like they’re waiting for you to do,” Brash said shortly, naming the ghost who haunted and curated the monsters’ Royal Library and Archives.

Val blinked in surprise and tripped over their words. “Penn? They’ve switched? Why are they stressed?”

“That’s rude,” Brash huffed. “You’re the one who’s been talking to them about our spying, getting them involved. They’re anxious about our safety. They’re anxious about you.”

Val drew back, eyes glassy with realization.

“You must’ve been avoiding the library, otherwise you’d know,” Brash continued. “Penn shooed off all the library volunteers and day-workers, made them take vacation. They’ve been singing courtship songs for days now — they keep working, but singing the whole time. I heard it from a corporeal person — they said Penn found them their book just as fast as ever, but it was the spookiest check-out they’d ever experienced.”

Lexical and Veracious had been eavesdropping, drifting closer and closer. Lex chimed in.

“I heard something like that too. And I heard that Penn won’t accept any of us other ghosts as a suitor — they must be waiting for you, Val. I heard that Perceptive went to the library to do some research and when they heard Pensive’s song they went mad with lust and zoomed right over and glommed on. Twenty minutes went by before they realized that nothing was happening.”

Vera interrupted. “Perci did that? No way. I heard it was Rhet?”

“Maybe it was both of them. Maybe at the same time,” Lex tittered, and the two of them collapsed into giggles again.

That either of those two cerebral ghosts would act so crudely was ridiculous, but Val’s mind supplied the image anyway, in plentiful detail. The thought of Penn’s large form being fondled by two ghosts brought a maelstrom of feelings — some enraging, some tantalizing, some repellent, all flavors of painful. Val howled and manifested a row of ectoplasmic copies in the air, a legion of miniature ghosts that fell down on Veracious and Lexical’s heads. They shrieked, still laughing, and flew into the air arm-in-arm, phasing through the ceiling and away.

The manifested copies vanished. Val panted. Brash waited.

Val paced their words. “It’s just that… if Penn and I… If we start a new lineage, we’ll have to move apart. Not have to… want to. That’s just the way it is, it’s just nature. I’ll have to leave the city with my child. The work we’ve been doing is too important to me, I don’t want to give it up.”

“You don’t have to, necessarily. Half of us will probably be staying in the city too — we can help each other out raising the babies. And yeah, Penn’s definitely going to stay in the city, but it’s not like they ever leave the library. Their child will stick with them, at least at first — it wouldn’t be hard to avoid them.”

Val grimaced. “I guess you’re right. But it’s not even that, really. I’m thinking about our friendship. Me and Penn have gotten so close… I don’t want that to change, for anything. If we could stay together afterwards, maybe…”

Brash squinted in surprise. “You’re talking like a corporeal person.”

Val chewed their lip and frowned. “I guess no matter what, I have to go talk to the King and Queen now. Tell them what’s going on. This meeting is over.”

“Yeah, well, I know you…” Brash began.

Val phased through the ceiling and away without another word.

 

* * * * *

After the dim closeness of the little under-eaves room the ghosts had used for their meeting, the royal audience room was cavernous and glaringly bright. Valorous felt exposed.

Windows had been opened to the pleasant morning, and a cool breeze eased around columns, undulated banners and the edge of Toriel’s purple robes, and stirred the fine golden hairs around Asgore’s mild, youthful face.

Valorous wasn’t sure what they had expected from the King after their admission that there was no new intelligence — maybe not anger, but surely disappointment — but Asgore took in the news with a kindly nod of acceptance.

“My diplomats and I are still acting on the last information from the Spectral Spies. And what information it was! I’m certain at our upcoming meeting the humans will be so ashamed to find out what we know that we’ll be in a strong position to re-negotiate. Your team of spooks have given us monsters quite the high ground.”

Asgore continued speaking, but his words seemed to meld and lose definition, his voice transforming into a texture of bass tones. Val’s form had become exquisitely sensitive, and the sound waves moving through the air sent shudders through their ectoplasm. Their imagination burst into conscious thought again, supplying an image as solid and vivid as an oil painting. Val envisioned the two monsters in front of them embracing, Asgore’s bass voice thrumming as he caressed Toriel’s body, her response in sweet piercing treble, and the two intertwining, Asgore’s body becoming permeable and opening to let Toriel enter…

Toriel spoke their name and Val jerked back to reality.

“Are you quite well?” Toriel was asking. “You look… preoccupied.”

Val reminded themselves, in a panic, that the pictures in their mind weren’t visible to everyone in the room. An indigo flush spread over their surface, and they swayed in mid-air, grappling for a response.

Toriel turned to Asgore, eyebrows knit in concern. “Look at them, they’re exhausted.”

She clasped her hands and leaned forward in her chair. “I fear your devotion has driven you too hard. You and the other ghosts have done so much for our kingdom — you must not do harm to yourselves in the process. If there is something you need, speak freely.”

Val considered and discarded a half-dozen ways to explain what was happening, all overly intimate and embarrassing. The simplest response spilled out. “King, Queen… the other ghosts in the Contingent and I need time to… tend to our families. We have to take a month of leave. Some of us will not be able to return afterwards. I’ll find new recruits and train them, I promise…”

Asgore held up a hand, and he and Toriel exchanged looks. Asgore responded. “Family is of the utmost importance. You have shown your loyalty, and I trust your judgement in this. Do what you must, and with my blessing.”

The formalities of ending the meeting went by in a blur. As soon as Val exited the audience chamber they charted a straight line to the library, phasing directly through walls in their way.

* * * * *

Brash had been correct. Stopped just outside the library to catch their breath, Valorous heard a trill of ghost song filter through the door, a high note of longing that reverberated inside their form more powerfully than physical soundwaves. They entered the library as they always had, phasing through the door, and paused just inside the threshold. The Pensive Ghost, the library’s caretaker and sole full-time resident, was out of sight somewhere among the stacks. Their singing continued, voice steadily rising and falling. Normally Val would have called out their name and then waited to be greeted, but this time they drifted in among the shelves, transfixed by the sound. 

The library was empty except for the two of them. It wasn’t hard to imagine how Penn had managed that. A disembodied moaning voice, the wooden rattle and thunk of the book carts, books flying from the shelves to the tables and back again in the grip of invisible hands, eyes watching from the edge of peripheral vision: a ghost could follow the etiquette of a good and helpful librarian and still do a lot to make visitors unwilling to stay very long.

Rounding the corner of one stack, Pensive came into view beside a half-full book-cart. They hung in the air like a fat slice of sunbeam, diffuse light through the library’s high windows washing their pale form into pastel, as graceful against dark shelves and bookbindings as an impressionist’s brushstroke.

Sensing Val’s presence they turned, a thick book held in their stubby arms. “Wait,” they said, and turned their back on Val. 

Val’s insides clenched sickeningly; Penn had rejected them after all, and just like that? But Penn was only lifting the book to a higher shelf, verifying the annotations on the binding, twice, three times, and sliding it back into its proper location with loving precision.

Penn drifted back to floor-level, smiling, their large mild eyes fixed on Val. Waiting. 

But Val just hovered, staring. Their friend looked exactly the same, but completely different — their soft appearance seeming luminescent, their few pale abscission scars speaking of experience that Val couldn’t match, their kind eyes those of a person Val would be loath to disappoint. All the glibness Val usually had, the words that had convinced ghosts into the corporeal King’s military service, the charm that sold the plans and the tact that packaged debriefings, it all deserted them.

Penn’s smile faltered at the silence. Their forehead furrowed and they floated backwards a book’s-length.

Val floated forward to make up that distance, and a little closer, and opened their mouth, but still some combination of anticipation and nerves throttled them, and they couldn’t make a sound.

Penn closed half of the remaining distance between them and asked, “Are you here on royal business?”

“No,” Val mouthed.

Penn crept forward. “Did you come to talk about strategy?”

“No,” Val managed to croak.

Penn was very close now, the two eye-to-eye. “Are you here to find a book?”

“No,” Val repeated, stronger, and the vowel trailed out, almost managing a proper ghostly moan.

Penn pressed their form against Val’s. Val’s ectoplasm yielded at the touch, conforming to Penn’s surface, going concave. It was almost embarrassing for a ghost who usually prided themself on their strong ectoplasmic control to suddenly be so helplessly malleable.

At last Val cried out, a bone-chilling wail rich with vibrato. Penn shivered and their ectoplasm went permeable as well. Their forms spilled together like paint in a pail, the poignant sensation of surfaces’ release rushing through them both. Now they were attached, their bases making an erotic Venn diagram.

Penn laid their head against Val’s for a long moment, then raised it with an expression of concentration. Extending their arms, they clasped Val close for stability and flew between the stacks to the door. They struggled with the bolt, as it was stiff with disuse, but managed to get the door locked — Val jostling oddly, feeling the shock of the bolt slamming home where their ectoplasmic surface touched Penn’s as well as internally through their connection. Penn lifted the pair into the air again, floated to one side of the main room, and settled onto the top of one of the shelves.

Laying Val on their back, Penn caressed Val’s belly and sides with both arms, massaging the ectoplasmic surface gently and then with increasing pressure, encouraged by Val’s moans. Penn’s form was larger than most ghosts, larger than Val, and Val felt comfortingly engulfed. They felt as if their form was melting; they were turning liquid and leaking into the ghost above them, into the achingly sweet sensation of connection. Then Penn started undulating against Val, slow waves that started in the union of their forms and flowed up and over their surface to the top of their head. Val cried out and arched their form.

Penn’s resonant chuckle sounded somewhere above them. Val opened their eyes; everything was dark, absolutely dark. There was a tug on their ectoplasm and they rose, and realized what had happened: they had felt so yielding that they had phased through the surface on which they rested, their head lost inside the books.

Penn palpated their front to encourage them to extend their arms, and nudged them over onto their belly, so their eyes could see the solid physical surface in front of them and their arms touch it. They resumed the undulations, pulses incrementally faster, progressively stronger, on and on. Val consciously firmed their ectoplasm, putting up resistance against the motion. The waves slowed, paused; Penn turned Val back over and looked into their face with concern, with a question. But they saw no hint of discomfort, only a sly look of challenge and invitation, and they mirrored the smile. 

Now face-to-face again, they pinned Val with their arms to provide a tactile anchor and resumed the rhythm, emitting little cries when the waves of their motion crashed up against the boundary where the two were still separate.

At last Val’s resistance gave way and they literally fell into each other. Now immersed face-deep they moaned at the intimacy, a harmony of high and middle pitches that could have been separated by logic but not by the experience of the two ghosts; the sound came from inside both of them, where their forms merged into one.

They turned over, resting side-by-side now. Easing gradually, their cores, their souls, drew closer together. Now surges of emotion were flowing between them too, echoes of feelings of joy and sadness and fury, giving the pleasurable sensations an edge of bitter-sweetness.

As the marrow of their two souls drew close, about to touch, it threw off a feeling like an internal shower of sparks. Val drew out partway, overwhelmed.

Penn opened their eyes, their vision fixing on a point behind Val’s head. Val felt a chuckle emanating from deep inside their body, as close as Val’s own heart, and their voice whispered close, amused. “You military types. So tough. You could have just said something.”

Val pulled back farther and twisted to look behind them. Ethereal words hung in the air: they’d thrown up a gray attack without intending or even realizing it. The words read, “Um. Hold up hold up a moment.” They also laughed at their incoherence, the sound tickling Penn’s surface from the inside. They pulled away fully, groaning at the temporary feeling of hollowness as their own ectoplasm sprung back to fill the place Penn had been occupying; Penn also winced and sighed at the loss.

A few breaths, a few minutes, and Penn drifted off the top of the shelves. Val turned to watch them go and felt a shock of disorientation. It took a moment to realize why: the daylight in the library had gone syrupy, slanting through the high widows in a different direction than their mind expected. It was now late afternoon, going on evening, even though it had felt like everything had happened in the space of minutes.

In a short while Penn returned, bearing a thick slice of transparent ghost pie divided into precise halves. Val’s eyes widened. “Did the Queen make that?”

“I don’t think any ghost has ever tasted Toriel’s pie,” Penn shrugged. “It’s all eaten up much too quickly. This is from a baker in the… I’m not sure exactly, it’s delivered here.”

They offered the plate; Val took one slice, bit into it, and realized they were ravenous.

“It’s good, though, isn’t it?” Penn said, taking their own slice.

It took tremendous willpower not to shove it all into their mouth as quickly as possible. Val forced themself to slow and savor it, but they still finished when the other ghost was only half-done. As the comforting weight of satiation started to settle in their belly, they lounged back on the shelf-top and watched Penn.

“I’m glad you chose me.” Val murmured. “I know I made you wait, and I’m sorry for that. You could have chosen another suitor, but you waited, and I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”

Penn swallowed, and blushed down at the pie. “It had to be you. I knew that even before I made the switch. But… um… what other suitors?”

“Uh... Didn’t Perci come to court you? Or Rhet?”

Penn made a rude sputter of amusement. “Let me guess… both of them at the same time? Latched on like little baby monkeys, smooching away while I ignored them and went about my business?”

Val wished they still had a piecrust to hide their face behind. “… Something like that.”

“Spectral Spies… more like Ghostly Gossips,” Penn scoffed. “That’s an old joke. It comes back up anytime ghosts get bawdy; just the names change. I heard it back after the Early Cold Snap, and during the Wheat Blight before that, and the Long Winter before that.”

Val felt a shock; they had been conceived during the Early Cold Snap. They’d known Penn had been on the earth longer than them, but they hadn’t realized how much longer.

If their face betrayed their surprise, Penn didn’t seem to notice. They continued. “Perci and Rhet did come here to the library, but they were already a pair. They just wanted to borrow the space, because they had heard it was deserted and they expected to get loud.” They popped the last of the piecrust into their mouth. “I don’t even feel weird saying that; every time I’ve ever seen them they’ve been loud. I don’t understand why they got together so quickly. I’d always thought they couldn’t stand each other.”

“Oh no, they just love to argue. It’s their absolute favorite thing to do. It helps in Spectral Spy meetings with setting strategy and getting facts straight, hammering out what actually is and what could be possible. It does get tiresome sometimes, though. I bet their courtship was like one of those human melodramas.” Val twitched their arms to pantomime ghosts talking. “’I hate you!’ ‘I hate you more!’” They mashed their arms together in a swoon and made smooching sounds, “Mwah-mwah-mwah!”

“Yes, just like that!” Penn snorted with laughter. “Perci was all, ‘Tell me how it feels!’ And then Rhet was all, ‘What if I do this?’ And then Perci shouted, ‘Fill me with your nonsense!’”

Val doubled over with laughter. They’d always thought Penn was proper, even prudish, but the switch was revealing all sorts of surprises. “No way! You made that up just now.”

“Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t,” Penn responded coyly.

“You had to have. You weren’t there,” Val countered.

The look of guilt that flashed over Penn’s face said otherwise. Before Val could process what that meant and begin to react, Penn had drawn their arms up against their face and hunched over. “Oh no. Oh no. I just wanted to make everything perfect. Now you think I’m horrible, and when they find out they’ll be so embarrassed and they’ll hate me forever.”

Val scooted forward. “No, no. I don’t think anything like that. I’m not going to tell anybody.”

Tears, thin and acidic, gathered at the corners of Penn’s eyes, threatening to spill out and sear the wooden shelves. “When I thought about you coming here I got so nervous. I didn’t want you to be disappointed. The only way I know to do things right is to do research.”

Val rubbed Penn’s abject slouching form comfortingly. “You didn’t just do it right, you were amazing. I never could have imagined how good you just made me feel. Forget about them. Serves them right for doing it in your home anyway. The only thing that matters now is that we benefitted from your research.” 

Penn peeked from behind their arms. “And practice,” they ventured.

“Practice?” Val couldn’t help their eyes widening at the word.

Penn ducked their head and blushed beige, but compulsively finished their confession. “The atlases are the right size. Especially the human cities atlas. It’s so thick.”

“Well… um… well done.”

The two ghosts stared at each other a moment and then burst into laughter.

Penn sighed with relief, rubbing at their eyes. “I’m sorry. All those emotions getting stirred up… I guess I’m the one who was really being fake-tough.”

“Don’t worry about it, please. I was just surprised, because I thought that you already… I hope you don’t mind me asking about it now, but I couldn’t help but notice: you’ve had children?”

“Oh, yes,” answered Penn, “only hope buds, though. The corporeal city managers take good care of their resources, and they take good care of the library, and they take good care of me. I’ve always got everything I need to be comfortable.” They leaned back, showing off their abscission scars, one relatively sharp and one faded nearly into invisibility. “This was Harmony, this one Canny, and here was Halcyon. They’re all such good ghosts. Sometimes one or the other will come back to visit.”

“Wait. None of your children help you here?”

“There’s not much for them to do if they were here. There’s money in the city budget for interns and curation projects, and there are always plenty of corporeal monsters who want to volunteer; in fact, we have a waiting list. There’s really only enough work for one resident ghost librarian, and I enjoy my work too much to give anyone else a chance.”

“Didn’t your parent haunt the library before you? Did you work together?”

“We did, for a while. But they left to become corporeal. It was just their time.”

Val mulled over this knowledge, but by this time the energy from the ghost pie had revved their system, and they felt renewed stirring. They nudged forward to touch their partner. “Um… are you ready to try again?”

“More than ready,” Penn replied cheekily.

This time it was Val who pressed Penn into the smooth wood of a bookshelf. They wanted to make Penn feel every bit as good as they had, but being smaller they couldn’t re-create that same sensation of being deeply embraced for the other ghost. They tried to make up for it with increased speed and force. “Oomph!” Penn exhaled, “Be gentle.”

Val backed off, thought a moment, and had an idea. They manifested their battle volley of ectoplasmic copies, a row of little ghosts, but instead of falling in attack these surrounded Penn delicately, nibbling and nuzzling with tiny mouths. Penn shrieked and giggled in delight.

Val leaned their form in and started a pulsing motion. This time the ghosts found each others’ forms familiar and the flashes of foreign emotions easier to navigate, and the integration was smooth. Their souls surged forward, then eased forward, touched tentatively and then with confidence. With immersive waves of sensation and emotion, with whines and wails of pleasure, the two souls melded. The intimate connection held deep into the night.

In the small hours of the morning the souls detached, and then so did the forms of the two ghosts. 

Laying on their back, staring up into the ceiling, Val watched an illusion shimmer into existence: an image of deep space and stars, as cast by grateful ghosts. A soft, deep weight of satisfaction rested inside them. They felt a tender spot in their psyche. While they knew that vulnerable open feeling would callous over in the coming days, for the time being they returned to it over and over, mentally fondling a thought like a sentimental totem: a piece of the ghost they loved was now inside of them.

Another idea kept surfacing in Val’s mind. They thought of the colonies of ghosts that formed in safe enclaves in the country and prosperous quarters of the city: sometimes dozens of individuals, generation after hope-conceived generation, sprung from a single soul and living together with a shared purpose. They thought of haunted houses where the chattering of visiting ghosts could be heard at all hours, sharing news and gossip and creative ideas. They felt how quiet the library was with no patrons and no assistants.

Finally they worked up the courage to begin to put words to their idea. “Have you ever thought about becoming corporeal?”

“Because I’m old?” Penn said it without a hint of offense; with amusement, in fact.

“Wha… no! I’m just asking because… I’ve thought about it. There are things that corporeal people can do that we can’t.”

Penn waited, but no more explanation followed. They stared up into the galaxies wheeling under the roof. “There are also things we can do that corporeal people can’t, and honestly… I don’t think I could give those up. I like being able to become invisible; it makes me feel safe. I like phasing through the shelves instead of having to fly around them, and I like being able to phase through doors, say if I suspect patrons aren’t just using the reading rooms for study. I like being able to possess a cart when it’s useful, and leave it when it’s not.” Their voice became quieter, distant. “Do you think it’s possible to become fused to a whole building? Not… physically, obviously, but… Everything here is familiar, everything is in the right order. I can’t imagine leaving anymore. Even the thought of going outside horrifies me.”

Val absorbed the information solemnly. “For me… I’ve met a few ghosts that went corporeal, and there’s something about them that’s really appealing. They seem so settled, at peace. Confident in themselves.”

Penn turned and fixed them with an eye. “You don’t feel confident in yourself? You, of all ghosts?”

“That’s exactly it,” Val huffed, waving an arm in the air. “It’s like… Let me tell you how I got my name. It was a little while after the Cold Snap broke, the first time my parent took me outside. The trees were full of dead leaves, and one got blown directly at us. I’d never seen one before, I didn’t know what it was, I got scared… but instead of going invisible and drifting away like baby ghosts should do, I attacked. I went right up and sat on it.”

“You sat on a leaf? I assume the leaf was vanquished? That’s adorable.”

“Yeah, it makes a cute story. And it’s a good strong name, one to be proud of, one to live into. But that’s just it… now I have to act heroic all the time, because that’s what everyone expects of me. And even with the Spectral Spies, when I tried to actually do something brave and important by getting the team together, no ghost wants to be seen as putting themself up too high above other ghosts, so they all point to me as the special one so they can keep feeling normal. I get so tired of it.”

“Oh. That would be a problem. I guess I’m lucky: I like my name. It means that when I’m quiet, everyone assumes I’m thinking deep, important thoughts. But really I just like to be quiet.”

“That’s what I’m saying! Assumptions. Assumptions that get made before anyone really knows anything about you. Before you even know anything about yourself.”

“Mmmm,” Penn made a listening sound.

Val mustered their courage. “Like the assumption that ghosts can’t become parents together and still stay friends. That they can’t live together afterwards. That’s one I’d like to prove wrong.”

Penn twisted upwards in surprise. They processed the thought before speaking. “You’re feeling a lot of emotions right now, strong emotions. Strange emotions. I’m not saying this because I don’t care about you, but because I do. I care so, so much. You’re going to feel different soon. That’s just how it is. That’s how it’s always been.”

“But what if…” Val grappled with the thought, pinned it down. “So what if that does happen? What if we stayed apart when the babies bud, and we raised them separately, the way ghosts do. And then when they’re all grown up, years from now… I could come back here. I could find a body, and I could bring it here, and I could become corporeal. Then I could feel differently. Then I could stay. Then you wouldn’t be haunting this building all alone anymore.”

Penn regarded Val, eyes deep, still, melancholy. They drifted close and held Val’s form in their arms.

“Maybe,” Penn said.

Together the two ghosts watched the stars.


End file.
